"What good is being pretty?" asks Maggie Grace's character, Madge Owens, in the middle of the Broadway play Picnic. But avid fans of the actress—best known for playing underestimated heroines in Lost and Taken and currently a groupie in rehab on Californication—know that pretty does plenty in Hollywood, especially when mixed with Grace's gritty, surprising performances. We spoke with the 29-year-old actress about her New York stage debut and her Crazy, Stupid Love moment.

ELLE: Have you done theater before?

Maggie Grace: Not since I was sixteen. But that was just community theater. I'm from Ohio, and I was in a Shakespeare troupe in high school-it was nothing like living this big Broadway dream.

And doing a William Inge play was a no-brainer for me, because his works are family favorites. I read Picnic as a young student, but my parents made me wait to see [it] onstage because they thought it was too racy!

ELLE: Tell us about your character, Madge. It's kind of a rite of passage for an actress to play this part, right? Gwyneth Paltrow did it before filming Emma.

MG: And Jennifer Jason Leigh did it, too!

ELLE: So in the play, Madge is engaged to the town golden boy but ends up causing trouble with Hal, a volatile, seductive stranger. What's behind her heart's decisions?

MG: With Madge, it's more than the perennial, "Why do nice girls fall for bad boys?" [question]. Sure, Madge is a classic ingenue, and she's got some fatal flaws—namely vanity. She's always been rewarded for the same stuff in her life, and sometimes takes the path of least resistance. But she is, at least, the architect of her own change—even though everyone views her as some kind of detritus left behind by this wave of Hal's masculine energy. She wants to make choices, even if they're not great ones, they are her own.

ELLE: What's one thing about Broadway that you wouldn't know from watching Smash and Glee?

MG: That the cast and crew is a circle of special, really present folks who I have come to care about so much already. The sense of camaraderie with this group has been incredible! We join hands in a gratitude circle before every single performance.

ELLE: So Broadway is a perfect, blissful place?

MG: Well, when you're doing a Broadway show, you have no free time. You're rehearsing all day and performing all night [in previews] leading up to opening night. You're exhausted. I'm literally napping and watching reruns of Downton Abbey in my dressing room—that's the extent of my social life right now.

ELLE: We should mention that Sebastian Stan, who plays Hal, is gorgeous and he spends almost the entire play shirtless and gleaming with sweat.

MG: It's ridiculously hot, right? It reminds me of that scene in Crazy, Stupid, Love in which Ryan Gosling takes his shirt off and Emma Stone says, "That's not even real; that's Photoshop." There are muscles on that man that I didn't even know existed."

ELLE: Did he just show up on the first day of rehearsal and strip?

MG: There was one day when the director said it would be helpful to understand how obscene it was at the time [of the play] for a man to be half-naked. He said, "I'd really appreciate it if you'd remove your shirt starting today." And it changed everything! All of us became so uncomfortable! Once that happened, I honestly think we could divide the rehearsal process. There was B.S.S. (before Sebastian shirtless) and A.S.S. (after Sebastian shirtless)!

ELLE:Picnic is set in the early 1950s. Have the costumes influenced your personal style?

MG:: Because of rehearsals, my personal style right now is New Balance sneakers and sweatpants. But when I have my normal life again, then definitely. I've always appreciated classic lines and a defined waist. I get to wear a beautiful Marc Jacobs dress in the play-it's pink and lace. It really needed to be a girlhood dream dress.

ELLE: Do people still come up to you on the street and ask you questions about Lost?

MG: Yeah! All the time. I love that they give me that kind of credit, to know all the secret details of the show. But to be honest, I haven't seen the show! Really-I didn't watch the episodes that happened after I left.